Sunday, February 2, 2014

A new review of Seth's Big in Japan artwork

How glorious to know that Seth's work is not disappearing, but still giving the careful viewer a thrill that is visceral. It's too bad that comic books are so small. For someone reading only for the plot, the visual details that tell the inside of the story are easy to miss. In Seth's work, no details were arbitrary: every piece of wall decoration, every nuance of positioning has been considered and has meaning. It has meaning for the story, and it works visually (though occasionally there are details he inserted just to amuse himself). In the panel above, for example, the room is made of body parts. The floor is a series of hands, the wall is eyeballs and teeth and tongues.
The reviewer, Greg Burgas, is one of those careful viewers who notices everything.

I am glad that people like him are out there, looking carefully at comic books, and pointing out to the rest of us the fine points that make Seth's work so much more than just nice pictures to go with a weird story.